My Home Affordable Steel Kit Homes [Video Transcript]

Chris Gray:So you’ve found the property of your dreams and it’s only a bare patch of grass. Only problem is you can’t afford to build a house. Well, don’t despair. There could be a solution. They’re called steel kit homes and they’ve come a long way from the ratty old shacks you used to get. In fact, they can save you heaps if you’re building a home. We’ve come to upper Coomera, a suburb on Queensland’s gold coast to check one out.

Steve recently designed and built this amazing house and yes believe it or not this is a kit home. So why did you buy a steel kit home?

Stephen S. :The main reason was termites. We had a big termite next on the hill and we didn’t want to have those kind of problems. Also, we wanted structural integrity in the building and we saved around 60% of costs on the building.

Chris Gray:60%? That’s an incredible saving. Now Steve did a lot of the work himself which meant he saved quite a bit. Most people who buy kit homes save around 20% of the cost of building. If a single story four bedroom home is 200,000 to build, you would be saving $40,000. The more work you can do yourself will help make the savings grow.

If this place is anything to go off, the quality is amazing. Honestly you’d never guess that this was a kit home. It’s absolutely immaculate. These homes might be cheaper to build but that doesn’t mean that they’re not top quality.

David Waddell:All our homes are made here. They’re all precision made. They’re all engineered so that each product that leaves our factory has been designed. It has been made. It has been checked and it goes out 100% correct. You don’t have any problems on site of having to cut and shut. You don’t have to manufacture on site. It’s a precision product. Goes up like a [inaudible 00:01:50]

Chris Gray:Because the steel is custom made to fit each specific house, there’s virtually no waste. You don’t get huge piles of rubbish like you do with timber. It’s all made here at the factory. The steel arrives in large coils. It’s then roll formed into frames that are unique to each kit home project. Once it arrives on site, you don’t have to worry about wet weather or theft, because steel isn’t affected by moisture like timber is. Since the steel is preassembled, it’s less likely to be stolen because most thieves just wouldn’t have any use for it.

They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day, but let me tell you, if the Romans had steel kit homes it would have been a completely different story. Because Keith and the team can whip up a new home in less than half the time it would take to build a timber or brick place.

Keith R. :Well every weekend, every Saturday, we have a working beyond where we’ll get 16, 17 guys together and just put up a house in a day. Normally on a Saturday we can put up a house about 280 square meters.

Chris Gray:If you think that’s impressive, it gets even better because you can pretty much build them anywhere even steep slopes.

Keith R. :They’re a lot lighter, a lot stronger. Literally can go on any terrain. There’s a lot of blocks of land out there that, you know, they are a lot cheaper to buy those sloping blocks of land simply because the mainstream builder will not touch them. Whereas with a little bit of thought and a little bit of design skill there’s really no problem with them.

Chris Gray:Because this type of land is often more affordable, it offers greater potential for capital growth once your home is built. It’s really important to speak to a licensed surveyor and get a contour survey of your block of land before you even think about designing a new home. They’ll tell you everything you need to know about your block before you get started. Which means the only thing you need to worry about is fighting over the design.

Stephen S. :We had a bit of that during construction. Obviously with two people, a husband and a wife, things might want to change as building goes on. We did have a situation in our master bedroom where we had some windows and a couple of walls and we needed to move them. When you’re in control in this circumstance, you can change them. There’s no cost difference. You can move a wall from here to there as long as it doesn’t alter outside the engineered side of things, then it’s not a problem. Whereas with a normal builder there’s a whole process to go through. When it’s your site you can.

Chris Gray:Which makes a steel kit home a great way to build that dream home.

Stephen S. :Obviously a kit home can be anything. It can be a little box in the back of a truck or it can be a 100 square house. It’s up to you and what you want to make of your kit home.

Chris Gray:With stylish and unique kit homes like this being built, it just goes to show that cheap doesn’t always mean, well, cheap.